Efficient and accurate atmospheric correction for high-resolution heterogeneous terrain

Abstract

A new method for atmospheric correction of high resolution patches over heterogeneous terrain is presented. This efficient method performs atmospheric correction of high resolution surface pressure variations over a patch where gaseous and aerosol constituents can be assumed constant. This is of interest for the validation of surface reflectance for pixels surrounding Aeronet sites in heterogeneous terrain. The method efficiency stems from the smooth variations with surface pressure of the functions used in the atmospheric correction which is exploited to decouple the high resolution variation of elevation/pressure in the atmospheric correction process. This results in very few radiative transfer code evaluations independent of the number of high resolution pixels in the patch. The method allows pressure correction at every point of a high resolution scene decreasing the errors in heterogeneous terrains of current methods by up to two orders of magnitude. The technique can be applied for calibration and validation of surface reflectance to provide a much greater volume of data for performance evaluation.